Examines how women are presented in medieval satire as gossips, scolds, and cursing witches, all manifestations of women with orality. Assesses works by Chaucer, Dunbar, and Kempe and material from cycle plays.
Clark, Roy Peter.
In The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing (New York: Little, Brown, 2016), pp. 149-59.
Reads the opening of GP (lines 1–18) as a periodic sentence that "builds to a main clause near its end," describes its thematic concern with rebirth and regeneration, and explores the possibility of regarding weather as character or as a metaphor in…
The glosses to Mel and ParsT in Wynkyn de Worde's CT (1498, STC 5085) are closely related to those in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.15, suggesting that they shared a common exemplar, W. That hypothetical exemplar clarifies aspects of the history…
Presents textual analysis about CT manuscript descent, specifically, that "a copying of *W [the MS used by De Worde for his 1498 edition of CT]" is likely to have "led to the production of Gg [CUL, MS Gg.IV.27] and Ph1 [University of Texas, Harry…
Garbaty, Thomas J.
Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 57-67.
Though it has been universally assumed that de Worde's CT of 1498 merely followed the text of Caxton's second edition (c. 1484), recent work for the "Variorum" reveals important differences between the two. Instead, de Worde seems to have used an…
Benson, C. David,and David Rollman.
Modern Philology 78 (1981): 275-77.
The three anonymous stanzas that Wynkyn printed at the end of his 1517 edition of the poem suggest that neither the sympathy for Criseyde felt by moderns nor the poet's view of TC as a religious work would have been found in an early reader. Wynkyn…
Wilson, Katharina M., and Elizabeth M. Makowski.
Albany : State University of New York Press, 1990.
Traces the history of misogamy: (1) classical antecedents in Imperial Rome, especially misogamy and mirth in Juvenal; (2) ascetic misogamy in the patristic period, particularly in Saint Jerome;
Hargreaves, Henry.
Essays and Studies 19 (1966): 1-17.
Demonstrates the plain prose style of John Wyclif's sermons by comparing and contrasting five sample sermons with passages of similar length from ParsT and the "Cloud of Unknowing," considering sentence length, complexity, and clausal construction;…
Thomson, Patricia.
Review of English Studies 15 (1964): 262-67.
Argues that Thomas Wyatt's ballade "If thou wilt mighty be" translates directly from Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," unmediated by Chaucer's Bo; his use of the ballade form, however, may have been inspired by Chaucer's Truth. Compares and…
Cooper, Helen.
Leeds Studies in English 13 (1982): 104-23.
Wyatt's awareness of the power of direct language is Chaucerian, as is the flexibility of his use of rhyme royal. Unlike Chaucer, however, Wyatt is a poet of the contraries existing within the individual, and whereas Chaucer advocates a stable mind…
Wyatt, at his most allusive in this poem, used Petrarchan strategies that Chaucer had used effectively. Wyatt's audience would have recognized and appreciated the vocabulary as intensely and specifically Chaucerian, reminiscent of the world of TC.
Justice, Steven, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Includes an introduction by Justice, five essays by various authors, and an edition and translation of the "autobiographical" passage in "Piers Plowman" (C-text, "passus" 5.1-104).
Includes comments on how "Godfridus super Palladium," Astr, and "The Book of John Mandeville"--found together in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Musaeo 116--share concern with "possible future[s]" and with “the role of practical or instructional…
Catto, Jeremy.
Past and Present 179 (2003): 24-59.
Describes the rise of writing in English during the "age of Chaucer," commenting on the Ricardian poets (emphasizing Chaucer), Middle English sermon cycles, Lollard translation, and other examples of the "elevated vernacular" of late…
Brown, Peter, Stuart Hutchinson, and Michael Irwin.
Canterbury: Yorick Books, 1990.
Contains sixteen short, illustrated chapters, thematically arranged and based on upwards of fifty authors from Bede to Virginia Woolf who wrote about Canterbury. "'The Holy Blisful Martyr'" covers Erasmus, Stanley, Tennyson, and T. S. Elliot, while…
Cooney, Helen, ed.
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Eleven essays by various authors, an introduction by the editor, and an index. Topics include the theory of courtly love, love and social class, romance depictions of love, and readings of individual works. For seven essays that pertain to Chaucer,…
Smith, Kathleen.
Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb, eds. Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England's re-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 195-214.
Argues that the rhetorical interjections and repetitions in MLT, read in the context of Trevet's and Gower's versions of the Constance story as "an origin point of English identity," focus attention on questions of myth, literary belief, and…
Perkins, Nicholas.
Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker, with the assistance of William Green, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 68-89.
Explores how the affiliation of bureaucracy and writing developed in England, plus the impact of the association on notions of authority. Mentions several petitions and warrants pertaining to Chaucer and comments on Purse and Pity as petitions.
Marxist rather than feminist, the book of ten essays holds that oppression of women results not merely from male dominance but from economic exploitation. The successful heroine Jehane in the thirteenth-century Franco-Flemish "Flore et Jehane" is…
Walker, Greg.
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005.
Walker seeks to understand reactions to the rise of tyranny during the rule of Henry VIII-- the "unprecedented changes of the 1530s and 1540s"--seen through records left by "poets, prose-writers, scholars, and dramatists who wrote, revised, edited,…
Matthews, David.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Matthews explores the English rhetorical device of writing about political topics as if the author were writing directly to the king, even though the works that used the device were intended for a wider audience. The device flourished in the late…
Wallace, David.
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature (Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 117-30.
The Italian city-state of Lombardy and the life and death of Bernabo, its most famous tyrant, provides inspiration for the fictional realm of "Lumbardye," which functions in Chaucer's works as a spatial metaphor for tyranny.
Employing the Lacanian theory of Slavoj Žižek, Sullivan examines the relationship of HF to Augustine's "Confessions," Virgil's "Aeneid," Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," and Dante's "Divine Comedy," arguing that Chaucer and Dante rewrite…
As part of a discussion of Gower's trilingualism and his uses of history, science, and literature, Zarins contrasts the treatment of astronomy and literature in HF with Gower's "praise of science . . . for its own sake."
